


track 1

by mockturtletale



Series: even if winter comes again [1]
Category: K-pop, 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Canon Compliant, Coming Out, Confessions, First Kiss, First Love, Found Family, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Protectiveness, Self-Esteem Issues, Sexuality, Trainee Period, Trust, dark thinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:54:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26239660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mockturtletale/pseuds/mockturtletale
Summary: yoongi had taken one look at them -jimin trying so hard to look intimidating but his toes flicking a frantic beat in his shoes, taehyung in his ridiculous coat, looking as far from composed as it was possible to be. jungkook and his fucking eyes, his cheeks, the smile that yoongi didn’t see for a couple weeks, but would have knocked him down like a wrecking ball through an ancient, groaning building no matter when it came -and whatever this was supposed to be, whatever this had become when he wasn’t looking, it was already sweet on his tongue.
Relationships: Kim Seokjin | Jin/Min Yoongi | Suga, Kim Taehyung | V/Park Jimin
Series: even if winter comes again [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1905997
Comments: 52
Kudos: 297





	track 1

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is intended to explore the themes expressed in ‘no more dream.’ it's the first of a seven part series that'll focus on songs from different eras of bts' career / different points in their lives and use those songs to map out that time and their different relationships during it. stories will be posted every 10 days starting september 1st and ending october 31st. they'll all be standalone pieces with different ships and themes. see the graphic below for the list of songs this series will feature and if you've got any further questions you can dm me or cc me any time! 
> 
> this isn’t supposed to be an accurate portrayal of what they went through during the trainee / debut process (only they could give us that) but listening to this song i thought about their clear anger and their audible frustrations with the systems they found pressed upon them. that’s the major exploratory arc here; feeling caught between what the world expects of you and what you dream of for yourself and how the press of that changes who are you are and what you can see yourself as capable and worthy of. 
> 
> (as such, this fic deals with some unpleasant things. please read the tags carefully. also although i don’t think it’s enough to warrant a tag i would also like to give a heads up that there’s some brief but not detailed mentions of disordered eating in this, a la dieting as it was and still is an industry wide practice in kpop and across most of south korea’s public figure / celebrity culture.) 
> 
> thanks to kh for being my brand manager / graphic designer / sister, thanks to nh and na for beta services so freely and lovingly rendered and thanks to cory for not letting me talk myself out of this. 
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/hwifighting) /// [fic twitter](https://twitter.com/mockturtletale) /// [curious cat](https://curiouscat.me/mockturtletale)
> 
> [ i also posted a little jungkook-centric 'first impressions' type thing over on my [fic twit acc](https://twitter.com/mockturtletale/status/1300920372083204097) to celebrate the blessed birth of jjk, if you're so inclined. ♥ ]

•• ━━━━━ ••●•• ━━━━━ ••

for a while now, waking up in the morning has been the worst part of yoongi’s day. 

even when he doesn’t have anything particularly difficult or unpleasant to get up and go do ( as unusual as that is ) just finding himself present in his own life makes his heart sink. 

he went to bed three hours ago and he climbs out of bed now still smelling like the greasy food that he’d spent last night delivering, because it was too cold to wait out in the alley for orders to be ready and the ahjumma who owns both of the restaurants he works for makes herself feel less guilty for how little she pays him by stuffing fried food into his mouth even when he’s mid-sentence about the diet the company has him on. 

it’s all for nothing, anyway. every night he comes back from his job with a couple of heaving bags of leftovers the rest of them descend on him like starving dogs. because for the most part, their ‘starving artist’ title isn’t hyperbolic. 

when yoongi shines the smashed screen of his phone at the floor like a flashlight to navigate the mess with, he sees that jungkook has fallen asleep with a half eaten drumstick still clutched in his fist, grease smeared and shining around his mouth. his cheeks aren’t as round as they used to be, yoongi can’t help but notice, and he makes a mental note to remind himself to talk to namjoon about getting jungkook to go to sleep earlier. he needs more sleep than they do. they can work harder to make sure he has more time to sleep than they do. yoongi nods to himself as he pulls on the first relatively clean hoodie he finds, feeling better now that he’s decided on something that he can do to make things easier for jungkook. and then he makes a note in his phone to talk to namjoon about this, because he knows his brain is too overtaxed to remember this on top of everything else. 

yoongi has a headache before he even sits down in front of their shared computer and plugs himself in, locks himself in with his headphones and a decisive switch of his focus. he can’t think about anything else when he’s in here, when he’s working on music. 

he can’t think about how much his back hurts, or how it feels like every bone in his body hums with how tired he is. he can’t think about taehyung crying himself to sleep, or how brittle seokjin’s smiles have become lately. he can’t think about the four full days it had taken some of them to pick up the choreography for their debut, when jimin and hoseok had had it down in less than an hour. he can’t think about the way hoseok’s hands had shook before he’d gotten on stage to rap with him and namjoon for the first time. he can’t let himself wonder if it’s going to happen again before they perform as a group on national television for the first time ever. he can’t think about that at all. he can’t think about any of it. 

their music is a box for yoongi. 

he’s safe when he stays inside it. 

he’ll be safe so long as he doesn’t stray beyond its boundaries. 

their music is a box for yoongi.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

yoongi knows as soon as he sees taehyung that taehyung has just come from vocal lessons. 

when taehyung got here, he’d been tall and thin and tense and nervous. it had been easy to see even then that he had a incredible amount of enthusiasm bubbling away inside him, a bright kind of joy in him that he could only hide for a moment, and only by standing totally still. after a second or two anyone could see how unnatural that was for him, how difficult it was for him to hold. 

he’d exploded out of himself after not very long at all. they’d greeted one another and had a few practices together and before taehyung even knew every other trainee’s name, he’d started to unfurl. he came apart faster when their debut was set; when they knew for sure which of them had made the cut. he’d pinged back and forth between the six of them like a pin ball, in constant motion, barely pausing to re-align himself on a new trajectory should he find himself on a collision course that ended with an immovable object. 

but after a while, it started to take him longer to bounce back. 

after a few months, it could sometimes take days for his smile to reach his eyes again after a bad lesson, after a scathingly critical appraisal. 

he always came back to himself, when he came home to them.

but it takes more and more time for him to get there, as this goes on. the toll it takes on him rises sharply and indefinitely and sometimes yoongi gets a glimpse of something that makes him think about how much worse it has to be on the inside; how much more of taehyung this is carving into and cutting away where they can’t see the damage it’s doing. 

jimin helps taehyung much more than yoongi or anyone else can and taehyung does the same for him. just finding one another seems to take away the sting of so many of the acidic words they find themselves on the receiving end of, and yoongi is pleased for them. yoongi’s grateful that they have each other. 

but nothing and no one can help them in some moments, and for taehyung a lot of the worst moments seem to come to chase him down after he has vocal lessons. then, he trails through the corridors endlessly, aimlessly, like a wraith without direction or purpose. seokjin calls these occasions “taehyung’s haunting” and yoongi doesn’t know if he means to allude to how it seems like taehyung is haunting the halls in these moments, or how taehyung himself is haunted during these times. either way, yoongi couldn’t disagree. 

“hey,” yoongi says now, when he comes upon taehyung pacing back down a corridor he just watched him walk up the length of. “ … hey,” he says again, because he doesn’t know what else he can say. 

“i’m okay, hyung,” taehyung says, because that’s the first thing he says whenever he’s not in fact okay at all. “i’m fine. i just - i still have a lot of work to do.” 

his hands are balled up inside the too long sleeves of his hoodie and his face is drawn. his hood is pulled up and his shoulders are almost lifted high enough to touch his ears. although yoongi doesn’t worry about taehyung a lot, can’t say he worries about him the most, he always finds it unbearable how brittle taehyung seems, when he’s like this. how he looks to yoongi like one more cruel word, one more suggestion that he has disappointed someone might collapse him completely. 

“you’ve already done a lot of work. you always work hard,” yoongi says, because that’s true too. that’s always true, even when it’s the part that their managers and teachers and trainers let go unsaid. 

“but it’s not enough,” taehyung says, his eyes set somewhere over yoongi’s shoulder and his gaze is vacant, unseeing. and then it snaps back to yoongi and focuses in on him, sudden and searching. panicked. “what if it’s never enough, hyung? what if i’m not capable of what i need to do or be to stand on the stage with the rest of you? our debut isn’t guaranteed. not for all of us, not for me, not if -” 

“taehyung,” yoongi says, clasping taehyung’s shoulder tight and resisting the urge to shake him, ducking in closer so taehyung can’t avoid his eyes again. “whatever we have to do to do this together we’re gonna do. together.” 

yoongi can’t tell taehyung that he’s got everything it takes to get the all clear for debut. taehyung’s right, any one of them could fall down at the final hurdle, none of them feel certain of their place. but they are all sure of this team, and they work because they cover for one another. because if someone falls down, there’s six other someone’s waiting to step in and take his place. for him, not instead of him. 

one of the first things yoongi learned about this process is that a balanced and working end result isn’t always about fairness, or about equal division. it’s about equity. it’s about everyone getting what they need rather than everyone getting the same and that carries through to their roles in the team. sometimes people need more help to get to where everyone else is, and they all pull together to get them there. but sometimes some things are expected of them that not everyone can do, and the expectation that they should anyway wouldn’t just be unfair, but it would be counterproductive as well. 

taehyung didn’t feel confident in his ability to rap, when he’d first been assigned that role. so they hadn’t made him do it. they hadn’t put him through the wringer to give a performance that they or the management team might find acceptable but that taehyung himself wasn’t happy with, wasn’t comfortable with, worked himself to death to feel simply okay about. 

hoseok hadn’t had any more skill for or experience with hip-hop than taehyung had, but he’d had enough interest to pull together the scraps of confidence he needed to give it a shot. it had helped, yoongi knows, that he’d known how self conscious and unhappy taehyung had felt about the whole thing. it’s always easier to help someone when you know where they’re coming from and how they feel. 

and so - 

“come. sit with me. talk to me,” yoongi says, leading taehyung away, back down a corridor he’s been up and down countless times today until they reach the stairs and can descend underground to their practice studio, where outside of class times, you’ll only ever find one or two of the others but no one else. no one who isn’t one of them. 

they fold themselves up into loose right angles between the mirrored walls and the scuffed wooden floors and they start off perpendicular to one another, but by the time taehyung is cracking open, he’s slumped sideways, his head in yoongi’s lap, his words a rushing flood. 

“i know,” yoongi says, when he’s exhausted himself into silence. when he’s purged himself of the poison. “i know why you would feel that way. why you think these things.” it’s different for yoongi, it’s different for all of them, but it always comes back to the same central fear. what if it doesn’t happen for them and the blame for that rolls to a stop at their feet. “the trick,” yoongi tells taehyung, “is to take how you feel - the fear, the confusion, the frustration. the anger - and do something with it.” taehyung rolls over to look up at yoongi from where his head is pillowed on yoongi’s thigh, his long fingers playing nervously with the rips in the knees of yoongi’s jeans. “you don’t have to use it exactly the way they’d tell you to. work at whatever they direct you to, but put this feeling wherever it feels right. wherever it’s going to make the biggest difference.” 

for yoongi, that had been a very early tight rope. it had been the ‘can i, can’t i, should i, i definitely shouldn’t’ back and forth until he’d decided that fuck it, if he was going to end his career before it had even started he’d do it on his own terms. instead of failing spectacularly because of poorly made tracks that he was ashamed to put his name to, he’d go out in the quiet flare of nothing close to glory having tried, at least, and so he’d sent them his edits. his ideas for how to make this utter shit sound even somewhat interesting and creative. and not long after that, they’d told him to send them more of his own stuff, to work on things he thought might work for the group - in his own time of course - and show them, let them see. he had, and it got him to where he’s at now. exhausting himself constantly, doing a full trainee schedule and trying to work as a producer on top of that, which isn’t to even mention his part time jobs, his prep courses for college, him and namjoon still trying to make their own music on the side and helping hoseok by coaching him through their process, too. 

it’s too much. 

every single day feels like it’s going to be one that brings yoongi to breaking point, leads him to the moment when he just can’t anymore, when he stops and does not start again, but the difference now is that it’s all for something yoongi believes in. even if he hates how it’s done, even if he can’t stand what they have to do and why, the goal is unchanging and it’s worth it to yoongi. for this, with them, he’ll keep going. 

for jimin, this advice had lead to him getting creative during the breaks of their choreography practices. he couldn’t change what was given to them for their performances, but he could practice other things he’d learned and perfected in his own time, and he very cunningly chose to do so when their choreographers were there to see him, if they happened to glance in his direction. it worked, it changed the direction of some routines and inspired dance breaks and choreography changes that made jimin feel more connected to what they were doing, more like he was an important part of a process that mattered to him. sometimes now, yoongi walks in on jimin and hoseok discussing what they’ll ‘accidentally’ show their teachers now, sometimes actually choreographing what they’ll ‘freestyle’ the next time they’re given a break to run through things by themselves. 

yoongi doesn’t know yet which part of this taehyung likes the most, or which of it is the most personal to him. but he knows what taehyung is like, he knows how much he cares and how hard he works. 

“don’t let your worries eat you up,” yoongi tells him, and where at any other time, for any other conversation, he’d probably start to play with taehyung’s hair, here, would touch him in some way to soothe him, to comfort him, for this - he purposefully doesn’t. “use it. use it up, tae, so that it doesn’t get to live in you. do something with it, do anything with it, but get it out.” 

taehyung’s eyes are different, when they get up from the floor that day. his face is set, without being hard. he looks older, somehow, seems for once to be almost believably the age that he is, but he’s steadier on his feet and he pulls his hood down as they turn the lights off in the studio and make to head back home, so yoongi will take it. 

after they eat with most of the others, yoongi leaves taehyung collapsed into a heap with jungkook and jimin, the three of them a singular mass on the living room floor. yoongi doesn’t think he’ll ever get tired of seeing the ease they have with one another; the way jimin is asleep between them so jungkook and taehyung talk softly around him, the way their conversation trails off into silence and then the three of them are napping, overlapping, their limbs holding one another down, keeping them grounded in sleep until someone wakes up and they’re all yelling now, tussling that goes nowhere because they can’t stop laughing, jungkook’s face smiling still even when they all fall back into peaceful sleep. 

yoongi heads back out after dinner. he tucks his beat up and falling apart laptop carefully into his backpack and pads the space around it with an extra sweater, not for him to wear but to protect the laptop, to keep it safe and secure as he carries it. 

it’s bright out again by the time yoongi feels like he’s done enough to deserve some sleep. that’s a lie; he never feels like he deserves it, but he lets himself have it anyway, when he’s especially afraid that staying awake for any longer will only mean he makes more mistakes, will make him useless, will make him walk out in front of a car by accident. the glare of the sun after the near total darkness of the studio - that isn’t actually a studio at all but a garage, a leftover space that no one wants, that everyone has forgotten about - hurts his eyes and he pulls the brim of his cap down low to shield them, to keep himself moving, to make him feel like he has been able to do something to lessen his pain. 

he stops by taehyung’s bed before he crashes and carefully, quietly brushes his hair back out of his sleeping face, finds the energy to smile for what feels like the first time in days when taehyung blows an unconscious spit bubble at him in response. 

yoongi puts a bottle of banana milk and a packet of dried mango slices on the floor next to jungkook’s bed and then he collapses into his own, closes his eyes, and exhaustedly, gratefully, slips away into nothingness.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

yoongi won’t ever let himself be put inside a box. 

it had taken bang pd weeks to talk him into any of this, and he’d eventually agreed against his better judgement for two reasons - because he’d been promised that he wouldn’t be forced to do anything that he really and truly disagreed with, and because … namjoon. 

yoongi has principles. he hasn’t figured out what all of them are yet, there’s definitely more of them in there than he’s had a chance to discover so far, and the depth of some still allude him even after he’s become acquainted with them. but they buzz in him like hornets in a tin can. they’re never silent, never still. when one escapes, someone is going to get stung. sometimes it’s yoongi, but usually it’s whoever is closest to him, whoever shook him hard enough to loosen the lid. 

yoongi gets asked to do things that go against his principles all the time. he wasn’t outright lied to, because he’s still told time and time again that if he really doesn’t want to do something, he doesn’t have to. but yoongi was tricked. he was hoodwinked into this, because what he could never have factored into any of this was the rest of them. 

“we know you don’t want to do choreography. we know you don’t want to be an idol. but you and namjoon are rappers, there’s five other members of the group that aren’t. they’re dancers, yoongi. they’re singers. seokjin wants to have a career in acting. don’t you want the most exposure you can get? don’t you want to give it your best shot? don’t the others deserve to do what they want to do, as well, yoongi?” 

for a while, yoongi wished he’d hated the rest of them. it would have been easier for yoongi. it would have been so, so much easier for yoongi. 

he’d joined because of namjoon. because they’d had a lot of the same goals, the same attitude towards enough things that yoongi had felt like he had an ally after only knowing namjoon for a few days. and then had come hoseok and that had thrown yoongi for a loop, but not enough of one that he’d started to worry. not yet. that didn’t happen until seokjin. hoseok was a seedling for yoongi’s fears and they’d sprouted with seokjin. they’d bloomed to full fruition with jungkook. taehyung and jimin appeared like instantly ripe fruit. like a mouth wateringly delicious seeming apple, blood red and poisoned to the core. 

and for yoongi, it had been too late by then. 

they’d come, before he’d thought far enough ahead to be wary of their arrival. 

he’d taken one look at them - jimin trying so hard to look intimidating but his toes flicking a frantic beat in his shoes, taehyung in his ridiculous coat, looking as far from composed as it was possible to be. jungkook and his fucking eyes, his cheeks, the smile that yoongi didn’t see for a couple weeks, but would have knocked him down like a wrecking ball through an ancient, groaning building no matter when it came - and whatever this was supposed to be, whatever this had become when he wasn’t looking, it was already sweet on his tongue. 

the poison was already racing towards his arteries, laced through his blood and irreversible. unsurvivable.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

by all rights, namjoon should be one of the kids, still. 

it’s only him being the leader that puts him in the middle. 

if you stripped away all the responsibility he’s shouldering, you’d only have the bare bones of a person, a jungle gym built of conviction, naivety and just enough hope to believe in himself and in them and in their ability to do something important, here. enough youth to still believe in the impossible, in other words. that person would fit easier alongside jimin and taehyung and jungkook than he would with yoongi and seokjin. 

but because of how this has gone, because of how much namjoon has shown himself to be prepared and able to endure, it’s almost like he skips right over hoseok in the age ranking, somehow. 

if taehyung, jimin and jungkook are one decided unit (and generally, they very much are) then yoongi, seokjin and namjoon are another. 

hoseok fits in both, and he hasn’t shown much in the way of a preference for either. 

yoongi, for his part, wants hoseok to align himself with the maknaes. or rather, yoongi wishes that hoseok would let yoongi align him with the maknaes. for the same reason that yoongi wishes he could do the same thing with namjoon; let him go back to where he belongs and let yoongi talk him into bringing hoseok with him too. 

yoongi thinks that the more they let him treat them like they’re kids, the better he can protect them. 

none of them are old enough to know how to take care of themselves. seokjin and yoongi - as the eldest, but still so young - take care of everyone else, instead. not because that’s any less work; it’s much more, actually, but it’s easier to know what someone needs when you can see it, when their body is screaming for it. yoongi’s body screams for what he needs, too, but so much of him is screaming, so many different voices yelling out from inside of him at once, that he can’t isolate any one for long enough to decipher what they’re calling for, let alone satiate it. 

when he finds jungkook or jimin crying, it’s easy to sit with them and put an arm around their shoulders and just listen to them, because that’s what they need almost every time it happens. they’re homesick and they’re lost in fifteen different ways but just having someone actually listen to what they’re trying to say is usually enough to bring a smile back to their faces. it hollows something out in yoongi, to have them smile at him like he has done something for him when actually, all he’s done is treat them like their thoughts and feelings matter. it makes something in yoongi burn, to think of how many days must have stretched out without this, for it to be bottled up in them the way it is when they spill all over him. 

when yoongi cries, he waits for it to pass. there’s nothing he can say or do to make himself feel better.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

seokjin’s return to the dorm is always the closest to a good day that they ever get to come. 

he looks better, after being home, and he comes back laden down with bags and containers, his mother just as much of a caretaker for them through him as he is directly. 

“i can’t eat this,” jimin says when he looks down at the heaped mound of rice that seokjin has just set in front of him, visibly gulping at the spread of side dishes. 

“no, you’re not _supposed_ to eat this,” seokjin corrects him, pulling a chunk of pollock free with his chopsticks and then lifting it directly to jimin’s mouth because they know from experience that if they just put food in jimin’s bowl he’ll either eat around it or pass it off on taehyung or jungkook. “but you can. you will.” 

jimin’s jaw clenches, his mouth locked shut. his eyelashes lower and yoongi knows from movement of his pupils that he’s calculating how much time he’ll have to put in in the gym later, how much extra dance practice he’ll have to do to work this meal off if he eats it. 

they’ve all gotten a hard time about their weight at one time or another, but it’s never been like this for them. they’ve never had to worry about it constantly the way jimin does. diets are a one and done until it’s comeback time again and then they’re all in the same boat. for jimin, this is what it’s almost always like. 

the food is delicious, but it tastes like ash in yoongi’s mouth. 

he chews mechanically, swallows down the lump in his throat alongside his mouthful. 

jimin eats, but not enough, and the fact that this makes this meal a win for them makes yoongi want to sweep everything off the table onto the floor. makes him want to pick his chair up and smash it off the wall. 

“hyung, will you stay late with me after practice today?” jimin asks, his mouth full from a spoon that yoongi watched him carefully piece together by protein content, and his eyes are big but they are not bright. 

“you need your hyung to walk you home, is that it?” yoongi asks, even though they both know that it’s not. all yoongi wants to do is help jimin, do anything he can to make some part of this somehow easier for him, but yoongi needs help too. it pains him, that no matter what he does he still needs to ask this of jimin, though technically it’s jimin that’s offering. it kills yoongi, that he cannot say no. 

“i’m afraid of the dark, hyung,” jimin says, and yoongi almost wants to laugh, but it’s not funny at all, how they live in the dark, now. 

“i’ll stay with you,” yoongi tells him, and jimin nods and eats another mouthful, seokjin humming like he can taste what jimin’s eating. “hyung’ll be there.” 

it’s not much, it’s not nearly enough, but it’s all yoongi can do. 

yoongi can’t do anything for jimin, but he can prop him up. 

he can’t always keep him on his feet, but he’ll always break his fall. 

“here,” seokjin says, pushing a bowl towards jimin, “be a good boy and finish this off for me so the clean up is easier.” 

jimin rolls his eyes, but finishes the soup. he finishes everything they put in front of him even though that’s all he eats, never taking anything for himself, and when he stands up from the table he holds a self conscious hand to his stomach. 

he ate, though, and most days that’s as good as it can get. 

when it’s just the two of them, seokjin rests his chin in his hand and looks across the table at yoongi and smiles. it’s thin and it’s watery, but it maybe means more to yoongi for that. because seokjin doesn’t try to lie to him about being okay, doesn’t try to hide from him when he’s hurting. it means so very much to yoongi, that seokjin trusts him with the truth of himself; the reality of all of him. 

seokjin closes his eyes, his smile slipping but only because it’s falling into place. it becomes smaller on his mouth, and it fits him better like that. it fits right. 

he looks halfway to falling asleep where he sits, but he seems uncaring about that. it looks like for a moment at least, the fight has just drained out of him, after dealing with jimin. after a team meeting this morning where he was told in front of them all to keep his thoughts on their music to himself because he was just a pretty face in this group, and would only ever be a visual, like that was something to be ashamed of even though it was all he was supposed to pride himself on. 

yoongi looks at him now, exhausted and hurting and lost, maybe, as much as they all are, but still fighting. seokjin fights harder than any of them, yoongi thinks sometimes, because he fights to be what’s expected of him and he fights to not let the limits of that hurt him and he fights to never let anyone except yoongi see that he’s fighting and he fights for all of them and he fights with himself, sometimes, when it seems like he’s caught between wanting to give up but knowing that he can’t. 

it’s the fight in him that makes him beautiful. it’s the way he pours himself out for the rest of them, somehow constantly finding new depths to himself, new wells to tap when he’s been dry for weeks now, that makes the reality of him so wholly stunning. 

yoongi wishes they didn’t need him, the same way he wishes he didn’t need them, the very same way he wishes on some days - usually the good ones, when he’s not aching so much that it’s too hard to have hope - that none of them had ever met one another at all. 

but they did. and he needs them, now. and all of them, every single of them, needs seokjin. 

“i need you, hyung,” yoongi says, and seokjin’s eyes fly open. “you have to stay with me. you can’t ever leave,” yoongi says, and he doesn’t know where it’s coming from, but he means it more than anything he’s said in weeks. it’s plain and it’s pleading, but it’s honest in a way that yoongi hadn’t been sure he still knew how to be. “please don’t go.” 

seokjin’s smile turns tight. it sits on his lips like the stain of something he’s just drunk, the mark of a poisoned chalice. 

“yah, are you stupid?” he asks and his eyes cut away from yoongi. he’s deflecting and that’s salt in a fresh and gaping wound, for yoongi. “where would i go?” seokjin says, and it pierces yoongi, a needle stitching him up, salt sealed inside, and then a bandage wrapped tight and thick to make infection fester. 

seokjin has other places to go, other places where he’s wanted. he’s got options that most of the rest of them don’t. but he came here, to do this, and it’s not hard at all for yoongi to believe that the wringer they’re being put through could have made seokjin think otherwise. because he says it like he means it and it’s that that makes it truly hurt yoongi. he wants to tell seokjin that there’s more than this out there for him, that he doesn’t have to tie himself to this and let the rest of them be an anchor that drags him down. yoongi wants to yell at seokjin and shake him by the shoulders and tell him to run from them, get as far away from this life they’ve chosen as he possibly can. 

“good,” yoongi says instead, the word sour in his mouth and sitting heavy on his tongue. 

because he needs seokjin. because seokjin is the only thing yoongi has now that he can be even a little bit selfish about. he needs him here. he wants him here, as well. 

“we need you, hyung.” 

this process hasn’t made a liar of yoongi, not yet, but fear has made him a coward.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

it’s yoongi’s fault, that they get used against him the way they do. 

that’s yoongi’s fault alone, because he’d meant to hide how far he was willing to go for them - how much he could endure if it was for them - but he’d failed. this hasn’t even truly started for them yet and yoongi has already failed; the wolves circling in his darkest, loneliest moments to pin yoongi down by opening their jaws wide around the back of hoseok’s neck, or taehyung’s, or seokjin’s, instead of his own. because they know now - not the other puppets, but the ones who have them strung up and tied tight - they know now that yoongi would sacrifice himself in a second, but that he won’t ever be able to bring himself to give up on _them_. 

they know now - not the ‘they’ that matters, but the ‘they’ that holds all the cards, holds yoongi’s beating heart in their clawed hands, their sharpened, pointed nails digging in - how to control yoongi.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

it’s never talked about. not directly. 

when they’d been talking yoongi into this but he’d had a choice, still, they’d alluded to it. 

“your music is very … expressive.” 

caution. fear, maybe. contempt, much more likely. 

yoongi hadn’t expected them to understand his point of view or encourage it, but he’d hoped - he’d still been able to hope, then - that they’d realize that the sharp parts of him were the only thing of worth he had to offer. he couldn’t sing, he couldn’t dance. he wasn’t beautiful. he wasn’t charismatic. but when he spoke, when he rapped, people listened. and that wasn’t because he was a talented rapper. it was because he’d had things to say and he’d work hard at learning the best way to say them. 

yoongi’s message has always mattered to him more than anything or anyone else. 

or it had, at least. 

now his message is something to be hidden. anything he wants to say has become something he must never let lead back to him, or be seen to be connected to them in any way. 

now, instead of a message, yoongi has six kids. they’re not children and they’re not his, but they’re kids and even though he still is too, he has claimed them. they claimed him right back and there’s no getting out of this, now. 

yoongi used to have a message that said a lot about who he was and even more about who he wanted to be and what kind of world he wanted this one to become. 

now he’s got six friends who are so very much more than that, and not a single one of them could tell you what yoongi’s message had been, or what it might be now. 

namjoon gets the nature of yoongi’s secret, probably has enough context to put it together pretty easily, if he tried to. but namjoon isn’t ready to know, maybe doesn’t want to yet, and that works for yoongi, because he’s not ready for any of them to know it either. 

it’s ironic, yoongi thinks, that the thing that got him here - the very thing that was the big bang for his desire, his greed for the spotlight - has become the one thing he has to hide. 

he loves them, and so he doesn’t ask himself if he’d do things differently, if he could go back and do it all over again. 

he loves them, so he doesn’t think about ‘what if’s. 

he loves them, so they can never know.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

“if he has one more can of coffee he’s either going to piss himself mid dance practice or he’s going to keel right over,” hoseok says, looking between seokjin and the pile of empty cans he’s been steadily building next to his backpack all morning. 

seokjin had been up most of the night last night helping jungkook study for his exams and they’d both been dressed and ready to head out to get jungkook to school when yoongi had gotten home from his delivery job. they’d both eaten cold jajangmyeon for breakfast, which is infinitely preferable to the nothing that they’d have eaten if yoongi hadn’t made it back in time to catch them before they left. 

“he’s got a lot on his plate,” yoongi says, feeling defensive of seokjin. finding himself hoping that namjoon finds a way to be gentle about it when he gets up and crosses the room to go talk to seokjin about this. “he’s doing what he can.” 

“he’s going to wear himself out,” hoseok protests, which is rich of him. it’d be rich coming from any of them, but hoseok - just like the rest of them - is his own only blind spot. “he needs sleep. his body needs to rest.” 

over by the window, namjoon has his arm around seokjin’s shoulders and yoongi finds himself looking at that instead of trying to read namjoon’s lips to figure out what he’s saying. he shakes himself, willing something that will pass for focus to return. 

“right. because he has time for that. we all do. we’re like seven sleeping beauties, aren’t we, hoseok-ah?” 

yoongi hasn’t slept in two full days. hoseok spent last night right here, hadn’t been home yet when yoongi got back from work. 

hoseok shrugs, his eyes falling to the ground between them. 

“i’m just saying. more caffeine is the last thing he needs.” 

and that’s true. but here’s the thing - seokjin can’t give himself what he needs, and so he’s giving himself whatever he can, whatever he’s got to hand, instead. 

and that - that’s something yoongi very deeply, almost intrinsically, understands.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

it’s worse, when it’s the kids. everything is so much worse when it’s the kids and yoongi has always tried to take care of those younger than him, those smaller than him, those older and bigger than him too, but it’s somehow more terrible than it’s ever been before, with these kids. 

jimin and taehyung find their feet here by reaching out to one another, by leaning on one another and holding each other up and it’s a beautiful thing, yoongi thinks. and that’s exactly why it terrifies him. 

beauty has no place here. 

even their art is something they have to try to hide the truth of; their frustrations - the loud, insistent yell of their hearts, their hurts - smoothed and layered over, hidden away under flowery phrases that they pull up out of themselves like weeds. just enough to attract eyes, but nothing close to truthful enough to raise suspicions. they’re branded as teenagers with a voice, the underdogs with something to say, but the things namjoon and yoongi say in the work they write for themselves, as themselves, will never see the light of day here. 

they’re idols and they’re supposed to be perfect. a balance designed to straddle the line between blank-faced nothingness and youthful, shining exuberance. look at us, but don’t expect us to give you anything you need to pay attention to. love us, want us, have us, but if you ever got close enough to touch, your idea of us will disappear in a instant, acridic wisp of smoke. 

the reality of them stays locked away in the basement where they sweat pounds off, where they cry out more salt than they’ve eaten enough to expel today, where they work themselves to the bone so jimin can get up onstage and distract the entire industry with a single flash of his abs. 

taehyung and jimin aren’t the ‘smoke and mirrors’ kind of beauty that they’re supposed to be. 

they’re the real kind. the true form of it - ugly and aching and terrifying for its intensity, breathtaking for the force of it. they’re a flower, but this isn’t a field. this is a concrete pavement criss crossed with cracks, space enough for things like them to grow, but only until they get too tall and can be stamped on, must be stamped out. 

yoongi would climb a beanstalk with an axe between his teeth to slay however huge a giant he needed to, to give jimin and taehyung the space they need to grow to whatever they’re supposed to be, whatever end they’re capable of and not only because he knows already that that could be spectacular. but also because no matter what they would do with themselves, no matter what kind of mess they might make or seek, yoongi wants them to have the space to do it. to try it. to grow. 

jimin and taehyung are close and they only ever get closer, even when they’re holding one another at arm’s length and yoongi can see where this is going, but other people are starting to catch on to their potential, to the wonderful, awful thing sparking between them and it’s far too soon for yoongi to have to deal with this, but it’s old and it is gnarled, this anger in him. 

for now, yoongi is the one getting stung by the bees of his frustrations, his righteous fury, his ancient and exhausted heartache. 

he’s stung black and blue, but it’s only on the inside, where it can’t be seen. 

it’s only on the inside and no one except yoongi sees it or feels it, so that’s fine. that’s absolutely and entirely fine. 

it’s only on the inside, where the eyes that look at them won’t ever reach, so it doesn’t matter at all. 

it’s only yoongi that’s hurting, so no one cares at all.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

growing up, yoongi had never really been aware of himself and how he was as something that was strange or different or wrong, somehow, by someone’s standards. 

he was always kind of a loner and not in a way that bothered him half as much as it seemed to bother everyone else, but it was only in middle school that he’d realized that his differences extended beyond that. 

there were girls in his class that he admired, girls who did really well in tests and cared so much about studying that they’d even yell at the loudest, meanest bullies if they were disturbed in the middle of working on something they needed full focus for. yoongi liked that. he admired it. 

but he didn’t have a crush on any of the girls in his class. or any of the girls in his school. or any of the girls from his neighborhood. there were a few noonas who both terrified and awed him, and for a day or two that had been intense enough to confuse for a crush, but it wasn’t that. not really. 

like most adolescent trauma, yoongi had had his moment of terrible realization during gym. or, more accurately, right before it. 

the boys in yoongi’s class weren’t quite old enough to have become self conscious about their bodies yet, so they largely changed into their tracksuits openly, all clustered together in the bathroom. it was a raucous affair; loud words and racing actions and too many bodies in too small a space with not enough time and almost no room to speak of. the conversation was crass, as usual, and yoongi was used to tuning it out. he wasn’t close enough to any of the girls who were mentioned to defend their honour and he wasn’t principled enough to stand up for them anyway, yet. 

but that day, talk had turned from girls in general to one boy specifically. a very quiet and lonely seeming boy from another class who yoongi saw around sometimes and wanted to approach. wanted to pull aside to tell him ‘hey, you don’t have to be lonely. if being alone makes you miserable, find people to be around, find a way to make it work.’ yoongi wasn’t lonely, but he’d have been the boy’s friend if he’d asked. if he’d thought it would help. 

when he learns that the boy is gay and that this is apparently something the boy is supposed to be ashamed of and something that all other boys are supposed to find disgusting, yoongi feels for the first time in his life completely and totally alone. he looks around at the mean faced, teeth-sharpened grins of the boys he’d previously thought of as neither his friends nor not his friends and he is all of a sudden, overwhelmingly aware that he isn’t just not like them, he is Other. he is different. and he’s supposed to feel bad about that. he’s supposed to be scared and embarrassed and he’s supposed to think of himself the way they talk of this other boy - like he is a problem that he himself needs to apologize for. 

it comes as a double blow. 

yoongi realizes first and foremost that he doesn’t hate this boy or find him disgusting or think of him in any way differently to how he had before he’d known this thing about him. if it was true, even, because yoongi couldn’t know that yet. yoongi didn’t know anything except the weight of his heart in his chest in that moment, the grip of his knuckles around the laces of his sneakers so tight that he felt like his fingers were going to snap and break. yoongi wasn’t like the other boys and he’d always known that in a relative sort of way, but his lack of horror at this announcement confirmed it in a way that yoongi hadn’t been ready to be confronted by. they were all one way and he alone was another. 

the second half of it came later that same week but a few days later. 

still in a kind of daze, everything hazy and uncertain now that yoongi had to be suspicious of lines that had been drawn when he wasn’t looking, yoongi had been sitting in class, his head in a puddle of afternoon warm sunlight on his desk, staring blankly out the window. he hadn’t been looking at anything out there, was rather simply looking anywhere that was beyond this stifling room full of people that made yoongi feel like either he’d changed or they had but either way everything was different now even though nothing had happened to justify that. he’d found his gaze lazily following the figures of the class out on the field, running around in pursuit of a soccer ball. it was a warm day, so most of them had stripped down to just their tshirts, and as usual yoongi found his eyes drawn towards the stretches of muscle and tendon in the boy’s arms. his gaze lingering on how nicely the new slopes of strength still forming and newly rising in their shoulders, in their biceps, contrasted to the hollows of the bones in their wrist, the rough angles of knuckles still too big for their hands. 

and yoongi had realized then, that his differences extended beyond simply not judging people the same way the rest of the boys in his class did, the way yoongi was probably going to be expected to. 

he’d kicked an errant and empty coke can the whole way home that afternoon, and then he’d kicked his shoes off and dropped his schoolbag in the entranceway and when he got to his bedroom he’d dropped face first onto his bed. 

and still, no matter how much more he thought it through, he could find nothing in him that wanted to refute what he hadn’t thought about before but suddenly couldn’t deny; didn’t want to try. 

yoongi had rolled onto his back and looked up at his ceiling, couldn’t decide if the sight of it annoyed him because the glow in the dark stickers he’d stuck there had peeled away the paint when they came off or because he didn’t think it would look okay again until he stuck twice as many stickers up in their place. 

“fuck,” he’d thought, and then said out loud; dour and resigned. 

and so that had been the first major life hurdle that yoongi had found himself at, set up and placed front and center before him by someone else. by everyone else, it felt like on some days. 

yoongi didn’t mind being different, he never had. 

but there was a word for this differentness, rather than simply a vague ill inclination towards it like his other differentnesses, and that had felt like a looming threat. like a storm gathering on the horizon. 

yoongi had made himself at home underground long before then, so he didn’t understand - wouldn’t understand for long time, still - why retreating inside his shell this time, in the face of this specifically, had felt like a kind of loss before the battle had even begun.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

seokjin had tried to kiss yoongi, once. 

it happened less than a year after they’d met, but only barely, and it had made yoongi feel like he had failed spectacularly at something. at everything, maybe. 

they’d been the only ones home at the dorm, and seokjin had decided that this made it perfectly reasonable to get out of the shower and then lie on top of yoongi on the couch, dressed only in a pair of shorts and still dripping wet, getting water everywhere. 

for once, yoongi found himself laughing instead of shouting and that made it too easy to keep it up, keep it going, and when he’d wrestled seokjin to press him down against the arm of the couch, seokjin had looked up at him, flushed and smiling, and tried to lift his head to press their mouths together. 

it was the smell of seokjin’s deodorant that made yoongi scramble back against the opposite end of the couch, his knees brought up to ward off threats, his hands clawed in the ancient, stained cushions underneath him. it was seokjin, and that was fine. he was close and he was beautiful and yoongi trusted him, yoongi liked him, so it something closer to good. but then his nose had filled with the cheap, sharp smell of the chemicals that companies decided to market as male for some bullshit reason or another and then yoongi wasn’t here anymore and it wasn’t seokjin that was straining towards him. yoongi was back in school and seokjin was just a boy and that had sent yoongi running. 

“hey,” seokjin had said, sitting up but not trying to come any closer. “i’m sorry. i - did i -” 

“you can’t do that,” yoongi had said, though what he’d really meant was ‘i can’t do this.’ 

“okay,” seokjin had seemed something like lost, but wasn’t angry. “because … you don’t like me like that?” 

“i like boys,” yoongi had said, because even in his panic, even when he could barely think past his racing thoughts, the alarm bells screeching between his ears, that had felt like a compromise. it was a deflection. 

“okay,” seokjin had said again, not seeming any less lost now. “i like you.” 

and that had shocked yoongi more than seokjin trying to kiss him had. he said it easily, and that absolutely floored yoongi. 

“but i’m a boy,” yoongi had said, and he knew he sounded like a child and not an especially astute one, but it didn’t matter because he’d felt like a child, then. he’d felt like he was trying to re-learn something that he didn’t even remember learning in the first place, but the way seokjin was treating this was completely and entirely alien to him. nothing he said nor the way he said it made sense to yoongi. 

“i know that?” seokjin had asked, and yoongi had felt like he was the one that had gotten something wrong, here, but he didn’t know what it was. “you’re a boy and i’m a boy and i like you. i wanted to kiss you because i like you. want.” seokjin had corrected himself, like that was in any way the most important part of this conversation. “i want to kiss you.” 

“well you can’t,” yoongi had said, because that part was simple. 

and then seokjin had just looked at yoongi for a long time, and it had hurt yoongi in a brand new way, what he’d seen in seokjin’s eyes that days. 

eventually, seokjin had come to sit in the middle of the couch and he’d folded his legs up underneath himself and he’d looked at yoongi the exact same way he looked at namjoon when namjoon insisted on trying to help him cook. with nothing but deeply fond patience. 

“okay, i won’t kiss you,” seokjin had said evenly, and that had helped to ease yoongi’s still racing pulse. “but can i care about you, still? can i take care of you, if i don’t kiss you? if i don’t tell you that i like you?” 

“why would you want to?” yoongi had shot back, because this had been confusing in a brand new way and he’d found himself thrown off kilter yet again and he didn’t like it, he didn’t understand it. 

seokjin and yoongi took care of everybody else and yoongi tried to take care of seokjin when seokjin wasn’t looking, when he couldn’t know that it was yoongi who was doing it. that’s how this worked. that’s the only way this could work. 

“because,” seokjin had said, reaching out for yoongi’s hand, and yoongi had been so blindsided by all of this that he had let him take it. “because i’m selfish, and a lot of this,” he’d waved his free hand in the air, “sucks. so it would make me feel better if you’d let me look after you. you’d be helping me big time if you’d do that for me, yoongi.” 

and that hadn’t been any less confusing, but it was something like solid ground, even if it had been foreign territory, still. 

seokjin had used the magic words - he’d told yoongi he needed something from him, he’d _asked_ yoongi for something - and even though yoongi knew then and has known every day since that he wasn’t actually asking yoongi for anything at all, he’d given seokjin this one thing, because he’d felt like he could. 

“okay,” he’d agreed, his pulse slowing again, his hand no longer shaking in seokjin’s. “you can do that, hyung,” he’d said, and they’d both heard that that permission came with a condition. came with limits. 

so seokjin had begun to look after yoongi a little bit more, and yoongi had kept right on looking after seokjin however he could without being caught. 

they’d never talked about the rest of it again, and that had made it easier for yoongi to deal with. 

seokjin hadn’t known what he was saying. he hadn’t meant it, not like he’d thought he did. 

and that was good. that was do-able. 

this - whatever it was, what it could never become - had stayed tolerable for yoongi, because of that.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

there comes a point when you’re under so much pressure that that’s the only force actually keeping you together anymore. 

or that’s how it feels to yoongi, at least. 

namjoon has a lot to say about force and pressure and the inevitable end result being something akin to precious gems, but it’s kind of hard to take to heart when he’s saying it with a perpetual sob in the back of his throat and his hands shaking the way they do when he’s either had way too much caffeine or worse - not enough. 

staying busy is all that keeps yoongi alive and upright and minutely, allegedly moving forwards. 

he learned very early on that days off were just another trap to be avoided at all costs. days off were at best a myth and at worst just a re-packaged kind of self harm. 

yoongi’s days off are spent exactly the same way the rest of his days are - working. it’s almost enjoyable, he finds, when he’s technically working because he wants to, and can in some ways even do it however he likes. 

it is the ultimate act of defiance, he thinks, to write lyrics about wanting extravagant cars and lavish jewelry when he’s sitting in his bunk bed in an old pair of jimin’s pajamas, wearing a pair of headphones that he’s had to re-wire and tape up four times now while jungkook is asleep half on his bed, half on the floor. he’s drooling a little bit, his open mouth twisted from where his cheek is squished against the edge of the mattress, and taehyung and jimin and hoseok are playing guitar hero so loudly that the wall between his bed and the living room is visibly vibrating, but still jungkook sleeps on, peaceful and undisturbed. 

looking at him is all that reminds yoongi of what it feels like to want things. 

looking at the rest of them when they’re not crying or ashen faced or carefully, purposefully blank in their expression or biting at the inside of their cheeks after getting chewed out by a teacher or manager are the only moments when yoongi feels like maybe, just maybe, they might make it out of this alive. 

looking at the rest of them gives yoongi faith that he’s never had before - faith that it’s going to be okay. 

this isn’t the fight that yoongi signed up for. it’s not the fight that he’d been prepared to die for. 

but now, with that fight shoved firmly to one side and mostly kept out of sight for him, yoongi has found something else worth dying for. 

even on the good days ( which are just bad days that are splintered by moments of laughter, smiles that make cracked lips bleed, collapsing to the studio floor with bruised legs and aching knees but awash in the glow of praise, alive for this latest glimpse of the resplendence of being deemed good enough ) the six of them feel like a cliff that yoongi is racing towards the edge of.

taehyung puts his hand in yoongi’s -

hoseok comes to sit on the floor in the basement, his back pressed to cold cement, just to be with yoongi while he works -

jungkook’s cheeks stuffed so full of meat that they puff up enough around his grin that his eyes are forced nearly closed -

jimin offering to stay behind and help yoongi with the choreography so yoongi doesn’t have to ask -

namjoon promising that if it gets worse, if it ever gets bad, that he’ll do something about it and yoongi finding himself believing him - 

and seokjin …

yoongi closes his eyes and steps on the accelerator as hard as he can.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

yoongi has walked and been driven by these basketball courts in the daylight, but he’s only ever set foot inside under moonlight. 

it doesn’t count as taking a break from work, because even when he’s here he’s throwing words at a page in his head as his hands throw a ball at a basket. he makes more shots than he does creative progress, but sometimes that’s okay. sometimes it’s just nice to fall into bed with his arms aching for literally any reason that isn’t doing the same single choreography routine for eighteen hours straight, all the while getting poked and grabbed and pulled and shoved by choreographers who treat his body - their bodies - like they’re mannequins, like they’re physically capable of only two things; getting it wrong, or getting it right. you can take a wild guess which one of those gets met with rough corrective hands and which gets a silent nod that they still wear like an invisible crown for hours afterwards. 

out here, yoongi doesn’t wear headphones or earbuds. it’s the only place that he doesn’t, most days. out on this court, it’s just him and the ball and the hoop. the satisfying bounce, the familiar weight and shape of the ball against his palms, the way his wrists know as soon as his ball leaves his hands whether it’s going in or not. 

everything is simple, here. it’s just yoongi and his shot and it’s up to him how he makes it, whether or not he even wants to take it. the whole world seems quieter beyond sunlight. most of the people who are out at this time of the night or early morning want to be left alone, so no one bothers yoongi. it’s just him, between the dark sky and the dark asphalt, the only soundtrack to his life as he lives it there the river away to one side and the echo of the ball as it bounces. there’s no one else to think about, nothing here that he can’t see without instantly worrying about. he’s completely alone, he’s only him for once, and he brings his worries with him, but he’s got the space he needs to actually work on them, out here. 

jimin and taehyung have opened a can of worms for yoongi. 

or rather, what’s happening with them has woken up the worms. they writhe in yoongi, now, constant uncomfortable momentum that keeps his stomach churning and his thoughts twisting like vines through his mind all the time, all day long and all night too. 

he’s gone to namjoon about it. he’s tried his best to do something. 

and namjoon understands, and namjoon is - as usual - on his side, on _their_ side, but yoongi doesn’t feel any better about it. nothing about it feels even a little bit okay. 

big hit have already fired one manager for making outright homophobic comments both to and about them (and all of them, not just jimin and taehyung) but there’s still an air of discomfort at the company. an insidious slant of perception that makes their every waking moment feel like a barbed gauntlet they have to throw themselves through over and over again. yoongi always goes first and he pushes as many of them behind him as will allow him to, but it doesn’t always work. yoongi isn’t always able to offer himself up as a shield for them, isn’t always there to throw himself in front of swords that get pointed at their throats and every single time he does, he feels like he’s taking another step closer to the edge. every thing he says or does to protect them or make himself a target instead makes the glare of the spotlight burn hotter, pushes him that much further towards something he spent his entire adolescence hiding and every moment of his remaining youth since wearing like armour, tossing out like a grenade. 

it’s the time and dissonance between the two that got him here, not taehyung and jimin. 

as a teenager, yoongi got very good at hiding that one particular truth about himself. he hadn’t really minded the effort that had taken, constant as it was, because he knew before he even knew the truth itself that it was one he couldn’t trust other people with. it was a kind of truth he already knew the general consensus on, or at least the opinion of the vocal majority, and that was enough for yoongi to know that this wasn’t an argument worth having. 

it wasn’t until later, that he’d realized it was a truth worth reclaiming his right to celebrate. 

he’d switched pretty seamlessly between the two, throwing himself into life in seoul with an enthusiasm that didn’t line up with the too fast, darkly gritty reality of it because it lined up instead with the freedom, the anonymity that came with big city life. living in seoul was like living online, in a lot of ways. it was a sprawling enough space that there were entire parts of it that could provide a home for people like yoongi, for people that didn’t judge him or anyone else. music had been a quick and easy in and yoongi had already had enough of an established reputation in that field that it was simple to make connections and find friends, find opportunities to perform. the underground hip hop scene wasn’t always actively welcoming to people who identified in ways that went against the “expected norm” whatever the fuck that meant, but there were always spaces in any underground community for the like minded to find one another and try to foster a space to create something important. even when yoongi wasn’t welcomed, he was accepted. he was respected, and sometimes he was looked at with an entirely different kind of admiration, for letting slices and bites of his truth peek through his music. even when he didn’t go into detail about his truth, his criticism of a society that made him and a million others feel like they had to hide the reality of themselves just to survive was loud. yoongi was angry. 

and yoongi is still angry. 

but he’s exhausted now, too. 

and for the first time he can ever remember, he’s afraid. 

the swish of the basketball through the net soothes him. even the smack of it off the backboard makes him feel better somehow. the pebbles on the surface of the ball are like braille, his skin reading something heartening with the message bypassing his brain entirely and that’s probably for the best, because yoongi’s brain is the flash and snap of bright, sharp teeth that come out of darkness and disappear quicker than they’d come, gut you in space of a single blink. yoongi’s brain as it is these days would eat the entrails of a happy thought, would make it nothing more than the streaked blood trail of what could have been. yoongi’s brain is not a place for things to live. yoongi’s mind is no longer a home for possibility. yoongi’s mind is, at best, a dead thing now. a silent grave, when he momentarily finds peace and silence. 

their dorm is silent when yoongi lets himself back in. 

namjoon’s bunk is empty, his hastily made and unused bed like a gaping mouth underneath yoongi’s mattress. 

jimin is still and quiet in sleep tonight, his body probably too exhausted and starved to summon the energy to knit together the quiet hums he sometimes makes, subconscious and sweet. it’s a comforting sound and the absence of it is loud. 

seokjin is curled up around jungkook in his bed, his arm thrown up over jungkook’s head on the pillow like he’s shielding him from the rain, like he’s protecting him from an onslaught even when they’re both dead to the world. as yoongi stands in the doorway, silently watching them, needing to reassure himself that everyone is okay, that everyone who is here before his eyes at least is alright, jungkook whines quietly in his sleep. when yoongi steps into the room and steps up to the side of the bed to put his hand to jungkook’s forehead, just the weight and warmth of his palm is enough to chase away the furrow between his eyebrows, the clench of his fists where they’re curled between his and seokjin’s chests. 

once jungkook is hushed, silent again, yoongi retreats to the living room. 

he sleeps on the floor there, his head pillowed on a pile of clean laundry and his arms folded high up over his ribs. 

it makes him feel better to sleep here. he does this sometimes. more frequently, lately. it makes sleep come easier.

he doesn’t know if that’s because it means he’s alerted to it and wakes up as soon as someone moves out of the bedroom or comes into the apartment, tries to leave it. he thinks maybe it’s because here, he feels like he can be their first and last line of defense. the whole sum of it, as best he can manage. 

yoongi is exhausted and he’s angry and he is sad. 

yoongi doesn’t know how to be okay, he just wants the rest of them to be. 

yoongi might not ever be okay, but once they are, that’ll do. that’s enough. 

that’s yoongi’s new dream. that’s yoongi’s brand new fight. 

namjoon doesn’t come home until after dawn and yoongi doesn’t have to be fully awake to see the pained droop of his shoulders, to hear the heavy drag of his footsteps. 

namjoon’s eyes are red rimmed and he doesn’t look at yoongi, keeps his eyes on his own feet, trained to look only at the floor, until he disappears into the bedroom. 

they’re yoongi’s fight now. 

and he’s pretty sure he’s losing.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

what sucks the most about all of this, yoongi thinks, is that it’s not always terrible. not every day is bad. not everything is an argument or a fight or a harsh hand, a cutting word. 

but those are the things they can’t forget. those are the moments that stand out for them and stay with them, so even when things are going well, it never feels completely or even mostly good. at best, it feels like they manage sometimes, somehow, in spite of all their shortcomings and mistakes, to do something that’s for a minute at least, considered good enough. 

sometimes, seokjin comes to the garage to watch yoongi work. it’s because he needs a break, he says, and yoongi doesn’t have the first clue what about sitting in a stale and always either too hot or too cold cement lined basement does to make anything easier for seokjin, but he keeps his laptop fully charged so he can plug it out and bring it to go sit with seokjin, when he appears. 

yoongi keeps working and seokjin doesn’t say anything, mostly dozes sitting up, but sometimes he leans his head in against yoongi’s shoulder and a couple of times he falls asleep like that, warm against yoongi and feeling close in a way that has nothing to do with physical proximity. 

and those moments, the time they spend together like that, seem to be the only part of this that never gets tainted, never gets overshadowed or touched by the negativity, not at all. 

these moments that the two of them share, yoongi tucks away carefully, hides deep and pads thickly to keep safe, to keep the shadows out. 

those moments are the only ones that yoongi ever experiences as only good, positive and heartening and other things too, but nothing bad, nothing close to negative. 

those moments hurt too, but in a different way. 

and to yoongi, even that feels good.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

“what the fuck does it matter to you?” this kid turns on yoongi when he steps in, and yoongi doesn’t care that he’s made himself the focus of this, because that’s what he’d been trying to do. taehyung pulls jimin out of the room, out of the line of fire, and yoongi’s only glad that they’ve gotten away from this. “are you like them? are you one too, is that it?” 

yoongi doesn’t try to suppress it when he feels an eye roll coming on and he doesn’t hide it when the kid’s face getting even redder in response makes him smile. 

“one what?” he asks, though it sounds more like he’s saying ‘fuck you.’ 

he’s tired and he’s empty and that’s always the case now, but it’s dangerous today because he’s running on what comes after fumes, which in yoongi’s case is spite and ire. this kid in particular has always pissed yoongi off, even though he knows namjoon and hoseok still get along with him. yoongi hadn’t been surprised when he’d been cut from the line up and he supposes he can’t really be surprised that he’s probably going to get taken on as a producer, because his music sucks, but it’s loud enough and lamely inoffensive enough to pass for … well … passable. sometimes the most yoongi can hope for is getting some of his edits on the track, or absolute worst case scenario just not having to put his name on it at all, but that’s better than not having to deal with this kid and his bullshit at all, because that would mean not being a part of this and that would mean not knowing them, not having them. 

this one kid is worse than the rest because he’s always at it. he’s always sniping, always trying to push people’s buttons, poking at them when there’s no one else around to see and then digging his thumb into the bruise when there’s eyes on them and they can’t yelp. 

maybe it’s jealousy. it can’t be easy, to watch from the sidelines while they drag themselves limping and bleeding toward a dream they might not achieve, but that he’ll never even get a shot at, now. yoongi would feel sorry for him, if he wasn’t such a total fucking dick about it. 

“one _what_?” he asks again, taking a step closer and squaring his shoulders, lifting his chin. a voice from somewhere far away inside him says it hopes this asshole hits him, just so yoongi could get him fired. but the hornets are awake, alive inside yoongi and furious in their flurries of flight, today. they buzz inside him, battering against the inside of his ribcage, throwing themselves at his skeleton like they’re knocking to be released. 

the asshole’s whole face twists, a hideous expression that makes yoongi’s stomach turn. 

“are you fucking gay?” is shouted directly into yoongi’s face, the heat of a stranger’s breath sour and awful, the ringing sound of it like a gunshot and it’s the first time that word has ever been said out loud about yoongi directly to him, when he could hear it. 

yoongi takes a huge breath, feels like every moment for at least a few years now has been leading up to this one somehow, and then he opens his mouth 

and nothing comes out of it. 

mouth gaping stupidly, his eyes wide and stinging now, yoongi doesn’t say anything at all. 

“you’re a fucking asshole,” seokjin says, instead, pushing his way between yoongi and said asshole, lightly shouldering the guy out of his way and then tugging hard with the hand he wraps around yoongi’s wrist. “fix your fucking attitude and learn how to not be such a huge, ignorant dick or i’ll fuck your dad, you pathetic little homophobe.” 

the guy splutters, seems torn between outrage and horror, so worked up he can’t get a word out now either. yoongi would laugh, but he’s too busy doing everything he can not to burst into tears. 

“try me,” seokjin murmurs lowly, savagely, over his shoulder as he pulls yoongi away. “look at this face, does it seem like i’m kidding? get the fuck out and stay the fuck away from all of us unless you wanna start calling me ‘step-dad’, you talentless, useless fuck.” 

by the time seokjin has pulled him into the first empty room they come across, a tiny space that used to be an office but isn’t anything right now, yoongi finds himself shaking. seokjin shuts the door behind him and then walks right up to yoongi and pulls him into his arms. 

and then he springs away, half tripping over his own feet and folding his hands behind his back. 

“fuck,” he says, but entirely differently to how he’d said it out there, “i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to just - i should have asked. if i could touch you. i know you don’t like - and i shouldn’t - i’m sorry.” 

he’s like an entirely different person, to the one who had just cursed out someone who was something like their coworker, someone who they were going to have to keep working with and seeing. yoongi hadn’t recognized the person seokjin had become, a moment ago. he’s never met that version of him, has never seen anything like it in his life. now, seokjin is himself again. his head is ducked low and he’s pouting into a lost seeming frown and his eyes are anxious but that’s exactly how yoongi is used to seeing him look. this is the seokjin yoongi knows best. 

it might not have made sense to yoongi, how quickly seokjin switches between the two modes, if it had happened at any other time. any other way. 

but right now, today, yoongi gets it. 

because it just happened to him, as well. 

for all that he’d never really thought about the specifics of how it might come up, he’s imagined how he’d handle himself in the moment that just unfolded a hundred thousand times, and never once did he think to imagine that it might fall upon him like a guillotine. he never thought to wonder if he might choke. but that’s exactly what he did, and he didn’t feel like himself in that moment. he felt far too much like only himself, in that moment. 

“hyung,” he says, the first word he’s spoken out loud for what feels like years, and all he can think to say. “hyung,” he says again, rougher now, and it works exactly as he’d hoped it would. 

“i’m sorry,” seokjin says again, coming back to him and folding him back into a hug again, not letting go this time. “i’m sorry you had to listen to that. i’m sorry he said those things to you. i’m sorry that anyone would say anything like that to anyone.” 

“i didn’t -” yoongi starts to say, but has to close his eyes and bury his nose in the soft fold of seokjin’s hoodie, instead. the familiar scent of him - a fruity body spray he likes right now and the mint of his gum and something like the pages of a book, like bound paper - calms yoongi in a way that nothing else could. “i couldn’t. i just couldn’t say anything, hyung. it wouldn’t come out.” 

any other time, seokjin would probably snort at his choice of words, and after a sigh yoongi would join him. but seokjin only holds him tighter, his left arm banded all the way around yoongi’s back to cup his left elbow in a tight grip, his right arm up around yoongi’s shoulders, his palm big and warm on the back of yoongi’s neck. 

“you don’t have to say anything. he’s the one with the problem. he’s one with the shitty attitude and gall to think anyone wants to listen to it. you don’t owe him anything. not a single thing, not a word, yoongi.” 

“but i - i should have - what he said -” yoongi has both of his hands knotted in the material of seokjin’s hoodie at either side of his ribs and he’s pulling hard, he’s keeping them pressed tightly together, seokjin’s chest warm and solid against his. the breath yoongi takes is too big, fills his lungs too far and leaves him feeling like he’s drowning, the small gasps he manages frantic and desperate. it’s like the air in his lungs is turning to cement. it’s like no matter how hard he tries he can’t find relief from it, every thought he has is more, every breath he takes is too much and he can’t, he can’t - 

seokjin’s body steps back, away from him, but before yoongi can panic, both of his hands are on yoongi’s face, his palms cupped up under yoongi’s chin, his fingers spread apart around yoongi’s ears. he ducks down to look into yoongi’s eyes and it’s that; it’s the eye contact that finally makes yoongi’s tears start to fall. as soon as his eyes lock with seokjin’s, at what he sees there - concern, warmth, worry, love - yoongi feels his face crumple. his mouth trembles and won’t stop. his vision blurs behind his tears and that makes him cry more, because it means he can’t see seokjin clearly. 

“there’s absolutely nothing you ‘should’ have done in there,” seokjin tells him, his thumbs gentle as he wipes up under yoongi’s eyes, the pads of them coming away shining. there is steel in his voice. “there’s only what you were comfortable doing or saying, and what that asshole deserves from you, which is absolutely fucking nothing, yoongi. less than that, even.” 

and yoongi knows that. he knows he doesn’t owe shit to that fucker, but he feels like he owes something to himself, he feels like he just let himself down, somehow. to be here, like this, crying about it now, feels like he’s letting the rest of them down - taehyung and jimin especially - and that’s worse. that’s always worse. 

“i want -” he sniffs hard, wincing when it stings, “i thought i’d be ready. i want to be able to ....” 

he trails off because he doesn’t know how to put everything he means into words, for once. he wishes, abruptly, that namjoon was here to get inside his brain and make what he finds there seem so simple when he sketches it out on a writing pad between him and yoongi, passing it off to hoseok to see if he has anything to add. 

he wants to be able to be honest, above all else. he wants to not have to be afraid of the consequences of that. and that’s why he’s a fucking mess right now, that’s why he froze out there. because he knew the answer and he knew what he wanted to say, but he hadn’t known if he should, even though he’d been certain that he shouldn’t ever have to ask himself that question. the truth doesn’t change and yoongi isn’t ashamed of it, but he has to be careful with it now, and he doesn’t know how to do that when all he’s ever done with it is tuck it away entirely out of sight or wear it on his sleeve like a badge of what would never be any less than honor, to him, but truth is always something important, something huge. 

“when you’re ready,” seokjin says, lifting an arm up around yoongi’s shoulders when yoongi steps back into his space and wordlessly, silently asks to be held, “you can tell whoever you want. i’ll be right there with you. but start with someone you care about, yoongi. start with people you trust. start with someone you love.” 

he says it softly, emotion layered all through his words, and he’s cupping the back of yoongi’s skull in one hand now, he’s holding yoongi close and here, with seokjin, is the safest yoongi ever feels. he’s shaking still and he’s hurting, but he’s not bottling that up or pushing it down and for once, the clamor inside of yoongi is quiet, barely a hum in him. he is so tired, but it’s the kind of tired that comes at the end of a long dance practice, at the finish line of a race. it’s the exhaustion of relief, laced through with adrenaline, and it makes yoongi feel brave. here, with seokjin, it doesn’t seem so scary, to be brave. 

“hyung,” he says, low and serious, and seokjin hums against him but doesn’t pull away, “hyung, i’m gay.” 

it’s the first time yoongi has ever said it out loud. 

even when he stopped hiding it, he’d acknowledged it when someone else brought it up or asked, but he’s never said it himself. not like this. 

seokjin does absolutely nothing. his hand stays exactly where it is on the back of yoongi’s head, his other hand banded low around yoongi’s waist, and he doesn’t still against him or go stiff where he stands. he doesn’t take a step back, or ask any questions, or shush yoongi in case someone else hears. 

yoongi says it out loud, and nothing changes. this moment is exactly the same as the one that had come before the word. 

“i love you, min yoongi,” seokjin says eventually, says after a comfortable cushion of silence, and it’s such an anticlimactic feeling that yoongi wants to laugh, absurdly. even though this is seokjin and that makes it different, yoongi is always braced for the very worst because that’s what his life has trained him to do. so when nothing bad happens, yoongi feels unsteady, albeit not in a bad way. he feels like he’d been ready to react a certain way, but how things actually fall out requires something entirely different from - requires precisely nothing from him, and he doesn’t know what to do with that. so when seokjin says he loves him, it makes yoongi want to laugh, shocked and delighted and maybe a little bit hysterical. 

he giggles, in seokjin’s arms. giggling had until this very moment been something yoongi thought only cartoon characters and jungkook were capable of, but he’s giggling now. it’s a tiny, bright sounding thing that yoongi doesn’t recognize coming out of his own mouth and his surprise only makes him giggle more. 

when he peeks up at seokjin’s face, he catches the tail end of an eye roll. he bites at this bottom lip to try and stifle his laughter, but it doesn’t work, not at all. seokjin huffs a laugh when he looks down at yoongi, and then they’re both laughing, seokjin’s arms both looped around yoongi’s waist and yoongi’s hands pressed to seokjin’s chest. 

“you might find this hilarious,” seokjin says, sounding exactly like his normal self again now, like the seokjin that yoongi knows best, “but i’m serious. i love you, min yoongi. and i like you, too. i like everything about you, even stuff you do that i hate when anyone else does it.” he rocks a little as he stands, his weight shifting from one foot to the other, the only sign of his nerves. “i wouldn’t change a single thing about you. i wouldn’t even make you taller, if i could.” 

and now yoongi is the one that’s rolling his eyes, but as much as today has been emotionally overwrought and explosively dramatic, yoongi doesn’t think he’s ever felt as light as he does right then, right now. 

“i love you too, hyung,” yoongi says. “i love all of us. even when everything has fallen to total shit, just being here with all of you makes it worth it. makes me happy, i think.” that doesn’t mean he’s not also exhausted and angry and pissed off at the whole world, most of the time, but when he’s with the rest of them all of that gets a little bit less easier to deal with, and that seems like a pretty special kind of happiness, to yoongi. it’s the best kind of joy he’s ever felt, even though he’s pretty sure it’s just a starter kit kind. for now. “i hope we get to see this through,” he says, and he really means it. he has hope now, and it starts and ends here, with the six of them. 

“oh, and i like you too, hyung,” he adds, giggles threatening to spill out of him again at the way seokjin frowns softly at him, mildly disbelieving at yoongi’s after thought. 

seokjin opens his mouth, looks to mean to start griping immediately, and yoongi loves it when he gets worked up enough about something to almost, almost yell about it, but he has to cut this one off at the pass because they’ve got more important things to tackle. 

“you can kiss me now, hyung” yoongi tells seokjin, and he grins at how high this makes seokjin’s eyebrows shoot up on his forehead. 

“oh, i can? can i?” seokjin grouses, but he’s ducking in closer, he’s close enough now that yoongi could count his individual eyelashes, and when yoongi’s hands slide up along seokjin’s chest to lock together at the back of his neck, his hands don’t shake or tremble. 

their first kiss is a sweet thing, slow and soft and clumsy, still, for the newness of it, but it settles something in yoongi. it’s soothes him, when he’d always thought that something like this would have to sting, at least the first time. 

it’s seokjin, though, and he’s always been the opposite of hurting, for yoongi. 

“i like you very much,” yoongi tells him, with one palm pressed to where seokjin’s heart is beating in his chest, “you make me feel like i can do this. like i could do anything.” 

“you can,” seokjin tells him, his hands slipping up under the hem of yoongi’s tshirt to find the line of his spine, his hands so very warm where yoongi is always cold. “you can do everything you want to do, once you really want to.” 

and because seokjin says it, yoongi lets himself believe it.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

everybody is sitting around in the living room, waiting for them, when they get back to the dorm. previously, this would have been yoongi’s ultimate nightmare. it’s a nightmare he has in fact had. and often. but now that it’s happening, he finds that he’s not afraid. 

he looks around the room at them, and he doesn’t feel alone. 

“we need to talk about today,” namjoon says, and yoongi agrees. he might not agree with what exactly namjoon thinks they need to talk about, in reference to what happened today, but that’s okay. they can figure it out. 

“if we’re gonna do this, if we’re gonna give this our all,” namjoon says, and jungkook is sitting so close by his side that when he turns his face to look at namjoon, his nose almost grazes his cheek. they both startle and blush and then look in the opposite direction of one another. “we - um. we need to figure this out. we need to talk about it.” 

yoongi’s ready. he doesn’t know exactly what he’ll say and he’s sure he’ll stumble through it, but he trusts them. he knows he can trust them with this. 

“whatever is going on with you two,” namjoon says, looking at taehyung and jimin, who are holding hands but both looking at their feet. they lift their heads, eerily in unison, but it’s yoongi they look at, not namjoon. “it’s cool if you haven’t totally figured it out yet, but you need to know that what donghyuck said earlier isn’t okay, and it’s not just yoongi hyung who thinks that.” 

now, they turn to look at namjoon. again, in unison. 

“i get in my own head sometimes,” namjoon goes on, “and i get so deep in there that i forget to say the stuff i’m thinking out loud, but it’s not just yoongi hyung who has your back. i don’t need any answers or declarations from either of you, from any of you, but i’ll always have your back and i’m going to be better at showing you that. i’m sorry i didn’t stand up for you today.” 

everybody seems at least mildly surprised by what namjoon is saying, but yoongi’s pretty sure that that’s mostly because he’s the leader and he shouldn’t be apologizing. but he’s namjoon, and that means he always will. yoongi’s not surprised by any of this. 

“i’m sorry too, hyungs,” jungkook says, and it’s absolutely ridiculous because he’s the baby. he’s a baby, still, but he looks so serious about it. he looks determined, and none of them tease or question him, now. 

“me too,” hoseok says, and seokjin nods along with him. 

jimin and taehyung look to yoongi again, and now they look completely lost. yoongi gets it and he’s pretty sure that’s why they’re looking at him specifically. yoongi knows that whatever’s happening between them, it’s something they’ve always been told they need to apologize for, so they can’t understand why everyone else is apologizing to them, instead.

“let’s clear some things up,” yoongi says, because as he looks at jimin and taehyung and their tired, pale, painfully young faces, he sees this group for what it could be. not even just a bunch of someones he can trust with his truth, but a group of people who can decide for themselves that however this goes anywhere else in the world, here it can be different. 

they talk for hours and hours and hours that night, until long after the sun has risen again and they’re all dead on their feet by the time they traipse into the bedroom in an exhausted line, but the lines between them have been redrawn. most of them have been kicked away entirely. 

taehyung leads yoongi to bed with his hands on yoongi’s shoulders, and yoongi’s already half asleep leaning in against seokjin’s shoulder, and seokjin is guiding jungkook with his hands on his hips and they’re like a beautiful, chaotic train of magnificent divergence, every single one of them someone that the world would call strange or different or wrong somehow, but every single one of them an important and beloved part of this. 

they’ve always been the same, but now they’re in agreement about what they’re going to do about that. 

it’s the first time yoongi can remember in forever that they all sleep at the same time, and closing his eyes when all of them are here, around him, exactly where he can hear and see them, makes his heart feel full. makes him feel already rested somehow. ready now, for whatever comes next. 

“i love you, bangtan sonyeondan,” hoseok murmurs sleepily from his bunk, and it gets echoed across the room until it’s all yoongi can hear.

•·················ıllııllıllııllıllı·················•

when jungkook first came to them, he’d answered the question of why he wanted to be an idol by telling them that he wanted to be cool. 

a month later, he’d answered the same question by looking furtively at namjoon though he tried not to get caught, and saying “because i want to change the world.” 

tonight, they’re less than 24 hours out from their debut, and yoongi doesn’t ask him, no one does, but when a silence falls upon the room, jungkook answers the question again now, anyway. 

“there’s so much suffering in the world. so much pain and hurting that doesn’t have to happen, but will anyway. everybody’s trying their best to do something or be something or change something that needs to be done better, done differently somehow, and it’s never easy. it’s so hard to find help.” 

they’re all huddled together on the roof of their dorm building, too wired to sleep but too worked up to stay contained indoors. it’s the middle of summer and it’s hot out, but that doesn’t make them any less inclined to sprawl all over one another; taehyung in jimin’s lap and hoseok with his legs thrown up over namjoon’s knees, seokjin and jungkook having pulled all the rickety deck chairs into the closest, smallest circle that they could. 

as he speaks, jungkook is looking down at where his hands are pulled up inside his sleeves to make sweater paws, his fingers spread apart to stretch them wide, but there’s a stillness to him that yoongi’s never seen before. a quiet kind of calm that looks something like maturity, like growth. 

“i think that if we do this, and find a way to do it right, one day we might be able to help a lot of people. so many people that the whole world changes, even just a little bit.” 

no one says anything, but every single one of them is looking at him. without looking away from jungkook’s bowed head, yoongi can make out their focused expressions, their tentative smiles. even just peripherally, he can see clearly how they all watch jungkook the same way - proudly, and with a kind of understanding that only the seven of them will ever truly share. 

jungkook lifts his head finally, and looks at each of them in turn. 

“we can help, hyungs. so let’s help everyone who needs us. everyone who just needs someone to understand.” 

the hard parts of this aren’t over for them yet, and they can be sure there’s worse still to come. but sitting there, all of them together, the night before they really start in on this war they’ve decided to wage - on this society, on these systems, on expectation, on a culture of judgement and criticism - yoongi is filled with a confidence like none he’s ever felt before. because it’s not just himself he’s sure of now. it’s that same feeling, only seven fold. 

seokjin slips his hand into yoongi’s and yoongi doesn’t turn to look at him, because he’s watching the way jungkook’s eyes fall to their joined hands and then how the smile that had been beginning to grow on his mouth rises instantly, blazes bright and certain on his face. 

“let’s do this,” jungkook says, and when he reaches a hand out in front of him, there’s already six others stacked there for it to rest on. 

something glints in the night sky over jungkook’s shoulder, far away and shining bright. 

and the thing about darkness, yoongi realizes then, is that without it; they’d never get to see the stars.

•• ━━━━━ ••●•• ━━━━━ ••


End file.
